Currently on View at our new Walker Street Location;
Jilaine Jones
A Walk With D. Ann
15 Orient
January 16th - February 22nd
Please note our new location;
72 Walker Street, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10013
(Entrance on Cortlandt Alley between Walker and Canal)
15 Orient is happy to announce the opening of “A Walk with D. Ann”, a solo-exhibition by Jilaine Jones. Featuring a selection of works spanning multiple decades, the exhibition serves as a concise introduction to a nearly fifty-year-long career in sculpture, representing its most essential formal and thematic concerns. Composed of steel, clay, plaster and concrete, the works on view prompt insights into the body and its structuring relationship to environment and perspectival space.
A Walk with D. Ann
We do not, in general, sense ourselves sensing the world. We’re just in it—the self, the world—moving through one via the other in such a way that makes distinction difficult. Walking uphill, one knows without looking what angle to bend one’s knees to accommodate its slope. Eyes look up, ahead. That’s the point—perception obscures itself as a part of its own process, as a concession to what’s perceived. In Jones’ sculpture, expressive masses play off steel planes and lanky directional elements. This insistent duality of organic and inorganic forms incites a felt sense of being in the world that includes both an awareness of perception and what’s beyond its scope—that stutter of comprehension as distant figures assert their specificity and then recede. The vertical stretch between a terrain’s high point and the low one is called “relief.” Walking downhill, weight is experienced as momentum, gravity as a release. Release in Jones’ work comes at you horizontally, like a path appearing or a body lying prone across it. In “Oxygen” (2015) a loose black scaffold opens laterally, low down. At hip height, a coarse black mass supports a narrow cylinder; in the distance, another mass supports a thicker cylinder. What lies between is sensate. And high up, overhead, there’s the point again—something to look at, long for. “Oxygen” is colt-like—-though it's larger than a horse. Jones’ smaller works don’t feel small. “Horizon in the Hand” (2018) is an iron-colored coil whose tight weight prefigures an expansion you can feel. In “Long Corner of Friend’s Studio” (2015), oblique spokes drag distance in immediacy, instigating scale. There’s a passive and active character to all these interactions, an empathic experience of the phenomenal world. In it, we’re all subject to certain conditions—the ground upon which a sculpture rests, like us, like all our things.
Text by Silas Jones
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Berlant, Lauren, Cruel Optimism. 2011.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception. 1962.
Conversation and correspondence with Jilaine Jones, December 2024.
“A Walk with D. Anne” marks the artist’s first show with 15 Orient and her first gallery exhibition in New York since 2001.
Jilaine Jones was born in 1959 in London, England and immigrated to the US in 1963. After studying at the College of Ceramics (Alfred, NY) Jones attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA) between 1979 and 1983. In 1981, Jones initiated a dialogue with Anthony Caro, and from then on made regular visits to his London studio. In 1983, she worked as an assistant to Tim Scott following her participation in the Triangle Artist Workshop (Pine Plains, NY). Solo exhibitions include: the New York Studio School (2008, New York, NY) Salander-O’Reilly Galleries (2001, New York, NY) and the Paul Mellon Art Center (1999, Wallingford, CT). Her work was included in the 2016 DeCordova Biennial and outdoor sculpture exhibitions at Chesterwood. In 1997, Jones received a Connecticut Commission Fellowship for Sculpture and, in 2012, a Pollock/Krasner Foundation Grant. She has participated in residencies including Triangle Arts Association (1983, 1989, 2006), MacDowell (2014), and Yaddo (2019).
For more information or for visuals, please contact the gallery;
15 Orient
72 Walker Street, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10013
(Entrance on Cortlandt Alley)
15orient.com
303.803.4347
